GOP staffers and pollsters warned in vain against House vote on Ryan’s Medicare plan

Six weeks ago this coming Friday, all but four Republicans in the U.S. House voted in favor of Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget plan, which includes a massive overhaul of Medicare.

The result of that vote has thus far been a political disaster. It has rejuvenated the Democrats, spurred protests at town hall meetings and spawned poll after poll showing widespread opposition to meddling with Medicare.

But it isn’t as if GOP House leaders weren’t warned of such consequences.

Glenn Thrush and Jake Sherman of Politico.com EXPLAIN how Republican dissenters were steamrolled during the run-up to the fateful vote.

A few excerpts:

The poll numbers on the plan were so toxic — nearly as bad as those of President Barack Obama’s health reform bill at the nadir of its unpopularity — that staffers with the National Republican Congressional Committee warned leadership, “You might not want to go there” in a series of tense pre-vote meetings.

But go there Republicans did, en masse and with rhetorical gusto — transforming the political landscape for 2012, giving Democrats a new shot at life and forcing the GOP to suddenly shift from offense to defense.

(Snip)

GOP pollsters, political consultants and House and NRCC staffers vividly reminded leadership that their members were being forced to walk the plank for a piece of quixotic legislation. They described for leadership the horrors that might be visited on the party during the next campaign, comparing it time and again with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to ram through a cap-and-trade bill despite the risks it posed to Democratic incumbents.

Share:

38 Comments

We’re still waiting for the Democrat’s plan. Their only strategy so far appears to be be make fun of the Republicans for having the guts to present their working solution first. Meanwhile, we’re inching closer every day to defaulting on our debt. Way to go, liberals.

Neftali: The only way we’ll default is if the pinhead Republicans vote against raising the debt ceiling, which is what some of them are threatening to do. Some of those idiots are even saying that default would be no BFD.

Poor doc! Once again, he’s demonstrating his astonishing ignorance of American political history.

Since 1960, Congress has acted 78 separate times to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit – 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents.

Ah, but now that Obama is in favor of raising the debt limit, many Republicans are against it, because….well, because they don’t favor anything Obama favors.

There are like, 5, perhaps 10 Republican tops in Congress that don’t believe defaulting on our debt is an issue. There are crazies in every party.

The simple fact is that almost all Republicans WILL vote to extend the debt ceiling, but they want spending reforms put in place first so that we don’t have to raise the ceiling any further.

Its a perfectly reasonable request, and there is simply no reason to go along with this strategy. However, instead of implementing spending reforms, Democrats in Congress want to kick the can down the road, and blame the Republicans for trying to resolve the problem. That’s not leadership, its cowardice.

Jerry – Know of a better, realistic plan that can be passed in the next two months?

Le’t examine some of the liberal solutions I’ve read in the past week on various cites:
1 – Single Payer – Oh, please. Not even a feasible solution with a vast Republican majority in the House
2. Tax increases for the rich – Exuberant tax increases will never fly, and its doubtful Boehner will let even reasonable tax increases be voted on at this time.
3. Eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse? Please, every administration tries to do this with minimal success.

Ryan’s plan will eventually eliminate the deficit. (Granted, over a period of decades) But the end result is not in dispute. What’s the liberal plan to eliminate the deficit?

Jerry – Excellent comeback, but It has no chance of being passed. I gave it a quick glance, and there are some things I like in this proposal. Will provide a complete breakdown after later this evening.

…which shows you that Medicare can hold down medical costs better than private insurance companies. Insurance companies pay more because they can, (the same as your answer to my question a while ago as to why US doctors earn twice as much as European doctors in terms of purchasing power). All they do is raise their rates and people have to pay them. The more they pay out, the more they can raise their rates, and the more profit they make. They have incentive (profit) to increase medical costs, not decrease them. Only Medicare has incentive to reduce costs because they have to raise taxes to increase spending (or increase the deficit).

Doctors are blaming financial pressures on the NHS for an increase in the number of patients who are not being treated within the 18 weeks that the government recommends.

New NHS performance data reveal that the number of people in England who are being forced to wait more than 18 weeks has risen by 26% in the last year, while the number who had to wait longer than six months has shot up by 43%.

In March this year, 34,639 people, or 11% of the total, waited more than that time to receive inpatient treatment, compared with 27,534, or 8.3%, in March 2010 – an increase of 26% – Department of Health statistics show.

Similarly, in March this year some 11,243 patients who underwent treatment had waited for more than six months, compared with 7,841 in the same month in 2010 – a 43% rise.

Again, you use an extreme example, just like when someone talks about increasing taxes, the opposition says “will if you raise taxes to 100%, nobody will work.

One way to control costs is to put pressure on providers through fees paid. Businesses do that through limiting wages all the time. Single payer has been proven over and over again, throughout the world, to be the most effective way to provide health care. The government, through Medicare, consistently does it better and cheaper that private industry.

The US is the only country where private insurance companies are allowed to make a profit providing primary health insurance. And they make their profit by charging excessive premiums and denying health care.

But if patients die they don’t have any revenue at all, if patients (or employers) don’t choose to sign up with them because they are hard to deal with or their coverage stinks then they lose customers, if providers refuse to participate in their networks they have no plan to offer..

The difference between the government and insurance companies is that providers and patients can NEGOTIATE with insurance companies and they are unable to negotiate with the government.

“The US is the only country where private insurance companies are allowed to make a profit providing primary health insurance”

That’s a complete fabrication. Australia and Singapore both allow you to purchase private insurance for a profit. I’m sure there are many others. Yes, both of those countries do offer their own equivalent to the public option, but they certainly also allow private insurance which does cost more, but offers quicker, more premium service.

I think I may have posted here before about a recent meeting I had with a regional administrator from the public health system in Australia. She was in charge of the 3 public hospitals in the area of Brisbane and lamented about how underfunded her system had become.

She marvelled at the health care options available to Americans and noted that they were even greater than those seen at the “private” hospitals in her region.

We don’t want a 2 tiered system in this country, we want a system with access for all patients to a market based system as I have described multiple times previously.

Patients MUST have control of their own healthcare dollars, otherwise we have no chance of controlling costs while maintaining quality and innovation.

The whole purpose of insurance is shared cost. Ryan’s plan shifts the cost back to the individual, at the cost of thousands of dollars per year and adding over 30 TRILLION (see comment #7) in overall costs, much of that going to profits of the insurance companies.

Sorry, I would rather have my money going to someone’s health care than to some CEO’s yacht!

The people in my office that handle billing are there to deal with Medicare and Medicaid billing issues as much as anything else.

If you have a billing error with Aetna it can be settled via negotiation and repayment. Have a billing error with Medicare (either in your advantage or in Medicare’s advantage) and you can be charged with fraud and go to jail.

We spend much of our overhead complying with rules and regulations put in place by the government. That wouldn’t go away, in fact, it would probably get worse.